Race, Religion, and Jewish Identity in the Operas of Fascist Italy

As wartime allies and ideological kin, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany are firmly linked in many people’s minds. In assessing the policies and attitudes toward Jews in these countries in the years after World War I, however, the tendency of many historians has been to focus on the striking differences between them—differences deeply rooted in the prior history of the two countries. In the decades before the Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) (National Fascist Party) entered government in 1922, Italian history offers no example of a clamorous antisemitic movement analogous to those that emerged in Germany and elsewhere in northern Europe; no full-scale polemical writings such as Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century) by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner’s son-in-law; no episodes comparable to, or with the international resonance of, the Dreyfus Affair in France or the blood libel trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis in Kiev. Moreover, not only prior to but also during much of the period of fascist rule, Italy was replete with manifestations of tolerance that were impossible to conceive in Nazi Germany. Jewish participation in the fascist movement was welcomed and Italian Jews joined the party in numbers triple their proportion in the overall population.¹ After the Nazis ascended to power in 1933, Italy provided a safe haven for Jews escaping persecution in Germany.² A pro-fascist Jewish periodical, La nostra bandiera (Our Banner), was established in 1934 as an outlet for that considerable portion of Italian Jews anxious to declare their loyalty to Benito Mussolini (1883–1945). He had himself met several times with Chaim Weizmann in 1934.³ Mussolini openly expressed his support of Zionism, and on a number of occasions he emphatically denied that fascism had anything to do with antisemitism; he also dismissed theories of racial purity as ridiculous.⁴ It was an open secret, at least among insiders, that the Jewish journalist Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini’s first biographer, was also his mistress. Considerable evidence exists, finally, that once German troops entered Italy, following the fall of Mussolini in 1943, many Gentiles—civilians and soldiers alike—courageously resisted the policy of genocide, contributing to the relatively high rate of Jewish survival in Italy as contrasted with Germany.⁵ For these reasons, many historians have painted a generally benign picture of the treatment of Jews in Fascist Italy, at least until the promulgation of the discriminatory “Racial Laws” (Leggi Razziali) in fall 1938. In their view, those laws were best understood as imposed on Italy by Germany, as a condition for their military alliance, and accepted by Italy as a matter of political expediency rather than any genuine expression of hatred.⁶ To an extent, Italian musical life reflected the sharply different social situation of Jews in the two countries. The oft-noted 1942 production in Rome of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, banned in Germany and Austria, and composed as it was by a proud disciple of the same Schoenberg who had been pressured into exile from Germany in 1933, is only one example. Italian censorship of positive Jewish references in print could also be quite porous during this period, and allowed much to appear that would have been inconceivable in Germany.⁷

To an increasing number of scholars, the positive view I have just outlined appears a drastic distortion of the situation for Jews in Italy during the fascist period, and has been energetically combatted in the last several decades. Historians such as Michele Sarfatti, Giorgio Fabre, Mimmo Franzinelli, Simon Levis Sullam, and Wiley Feinstein have instead focused on the evidence of a deeply rooted anti-Jewish tradition in Italy, present in the fascist movement even during its earliest phases, and independent of and predating any German prompting.⁸ In their telling, the Racial Laws, while undoubtedly related to the alliance with Germany, should also be seen as the culmination of tendencies inherent in Italian culture that long preceded the advent of National Socialism. To these writers, the benign view is a whitewash. The fissure between these views has implications that extend well...